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A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

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corpus/corpora 117

formulated using referentiality indices (co-indexing), e.g. She i said she i would

go (co-referential) v. She i said she j would go (‘non-co-referential’).

co-representational grammar A linguistic theory developed in the 1970s as

an alternative to transformational grammar, which aims to relate surface

structure directly to semantic structure. The approach proposes a single

structure which co-represents both the syntactic and the semantic aspects of a

sentence’s internal relations. The single level of surface syntactic structure

contains only information about class membership, linear sequence and nounphrase

hierarchy; the semantic structure contains only information about the

relations between predicates and their arguments.

coronal (adj.) (cor, COR) One of the features of sound set up by Chomsky and

Halle (see Chomskyan) in their distinctive feature theory of phonology, to

handle variations in place of articulation (cavity features). Coronal sounds

are defined articulatorily, as those produced with the blade of the tongue

raised from its neutral position. alveolar, dental and palato-alveolar consonants

are [+coronal] (abbreviated as [+cor]). Its opposite is non-coronal,

referring to sounds produced with the tongue blade in neutral position, as in

labial and velar consonants [−coronal] ([−cor]). The term has continued to be

used in later phonological theory, especially in various non-linear models. For

example, in articulator-based feature models, it refers to a single-valued

node involving the tongue front as an active articulator. In constrictionbased

models, it is defined as a constriction formed by the front of the tongue.

Coronalization is a term used to express several kinds of relationship between

coronal consonants and front vowels (see palatalization); for example,

the process of velar consonants becoming coronal, or anterior consonants

becoming coronal, before front vowels.

coronalization (n.)

see coronal

corpus, plural corpora (n.) (1) A collection of linguistic data, either written

texts or a transcription of recorded speech, which can be used as a startingpoint

of linguistic description or as a means of verifying hypotheses about a

language (corpus linguistics). Linguistic descriptions which are ‘corpusrestricted’

have been the subject of criticism, especially by generative grammarians,

who point to the limitations of corpora (e.g. that they are samples

of performance only, and that one still needs a means of projecting beyond

the corpus to the language as a whole). In fieldwork on a new language, or

in historical study, it may be very difficult to get beyond one’s corpus (i.e.

it is a ‘closed’ as opposed to an ‘extendable’ corpus), but in languages where

linguists have regular access to native-speakers (and may be native-speakers

themselves) their approach will invariably be ‘corpus-based’, rather than corpusrestricted.

Corpora provide the basis for one kind of computational linguistics.

A computer corpus is a large body of machine-readable texts. Increasingly

large corpora (especially of English) have been compiled since the 1980s,

and are used both in the development of natural language processing software

and in such applications as lexicography, speech recognition, and machine

translation.

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